Abstract
Breakthrough research in mouse brain anatomical delineation
The mouse brain shares remarkable similarities with the human brain across various regions, making it an essential model for studying brain pathologies, synaptic diversity, and regional specialization. To advance these studies, we have curated a collection of high-resolution dual-fluorescence microscopy images, termed as dual-fluorescent mouse brain microscopy (DMBM) dataset, complemented by expert annotations of 118 subregions. This dataset provides unprecedented insights into the molecular and structural complexity of the mouse brain. However, its full potential for detailed whole-brain analysis is compromised by challenges such as boundary ambiguity and sample scarcity in existing automated segmentation methods, prompting the development of the primary region mix (PRMix) augmentation method. PRMix is specifically designed to expand these datasets, enhance the realism of synthetic data and minimize overlap in adjacent regions. Our approach, together with the curated dataset, achieves superior segmentation performance across the mouse brain compared with existing methods, setting a new benchmark in brain imaging research.